“What is the biggest single health problem in the world today? In 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) tried to find the answer to this question. They came to a surprising conclusion. The world’s biggest killer, and the greatest cause of bad health and suffering, was not cancer, heart problems, or HIV/AIDS. It was extreme poverty.” - Kaye Stearman

How does poverty affect health?

In his 2001 UN address to the World Health Assembly, UN Secretary Kofi Annan said: "The biggest enemy of health in the developing world is poverty." Globally, there is a stark relationship between poverty and poor health: in the Least Developed Countries, life expectancy is just 49 years, and one in ten children do not reach their first birthday. In high-income countries, by contrast, the average life span is 77 years and the infant mortality rate is six per every 1000 live births.

The relationship between one's economic health and one's physical and mental health is a very deep one. In simple words, poverty does indeed affect one's health.As the slideshow to the left visually illustrates, living in poverty makes one more prone to getting ill, and leaves one unable to get access to healthcare.

lack of Access to food

Image: Nutrition facts of Injera, a traditional Ethiopian flatbread

In the case of hundreds of millions of people, living in poverty means not having enough food to go around. There are millions of chronically malnourished people living around the world. Malnutrition can be dangerous and even lethal. The effects of malnutrition fall upon an infant even before it is born; an undernourished mother leads to an underweight baby, and can cause a variety of different problems with development in the womb and later on in life. Under- and malnourished children are less active and are less perceptive to the environment, meaning that if they do get the chance to attend school, they cannot concentrate well. A lack of essential nutrients also stunts growth and development. The effects of malnutrition follow through in a vicious cycle until a person is able to find a constant source of adequate nutrition.

Slideshow

Lack of access to clean water and sanitation

Image: A relatively clean slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Because people living in poverty do not have access to basic human needs such as shelter, adequate nutrition, clean drinking water, and sanitation, they are more prone to falling ill in the first place. One reason as to why poverty-stricken people generally have poorer health than richer people is because of the conditions they live in.

For the most part, people in poverty to not have access to adequate sanitation. Living conditions of the poor, especially in slums, can be very filthy and are perfect breeding grounds for many types of diseases and health problems.

Slum-dwellers often do not have access to a clean source of drinkable water and are surrounded by waste and sewage matter, with no access to sanitation services. Due to a lack of access to enough working restrooms, tens, and even hundreds of people are forced to share one restroom. Not only is this very unhygienic, the urine and faeces are dumped into water supplies from which everyone drinks from. This allows for the easy spread of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentry, gastroenteritis, salmonella, typhoid, and parasites such as intestinal worms.

"Poverty creates ill-health because it forces people to live in environments that make them sick, without decent shelter, clean water or adequate sanitation. Poverty creates hunger, which in turn makes people more vunerable to diseases. Poverty denies people access to reliable healthcare services and affordable medicines, and causes children to miss out on routine vaccinations. Poverty creates illiteracy, leaving people poorly informed about health risks and forced into dangerous jobs that harm their health."

- Kern and Ritzen

The two way connection between poverty and health

Image: A woman stands by her husband's hospital beside in India

The relationship between poverty and health is a complicated one, and does not run only one way. Not only does poverty affect the health of those living it in, poor health can also affect poverty. If a person suffers from poor health, they may become unemployed or their illness may take a toll on their financial status. This can cause poverty or can deepen poverty.

In particular, poor families are most concerned with the health of the person who earns the most money in the family, the breadwinner. When the breadwinner faces an illness that needs costly medical treatment or passes away, the individual's family suffers immensely. The family, which is already poor, may be thrown into the deadly cycle of poverty, one which they may never escape.

There are many health problems and diseases associated with poverty, and some of these are highlighted in the following subpages.